Tottel's Songes and Sonettes in Context [Hardcover]

Though printer Richard Tottels Songes and Sonettes (1557) remains the most influential poetic collection printed in the sixteenth century, the compiliation has long been ignored or misundertood by scholars of early modern English culture. Embracing a broad range of critical and historical perspectives, the eight essays within this volume offer the first sustained analysis of the many ways that consumers read and understood Songes and Sonettes as an anthology over the course of the early modern period. Copied by a monarch, set to music, sung, carried overseas, studied, appropriated, rejected, edited by consumers, transferred to manuscript, and gifted by Shakespeare, this muti-author verse anthology of 280 poems transformed sixteenth-century English language and culture. With at least eleven printings before the end of Elizabeth Is reign, Tottels ground-breaking text greatly influenced the poetic publications that followed, including individual and multi-author miscellanies. Contributors to this essay collection explore how, in addition to offering a radically new kind of English verse, Tottels Miscellany engaged politics, friendship, religion, sexuality, gender, morality and commerce in complex-and at times, contradictory-ways.Contents: Introduction: Songes and Sonettes reconsidered, Stephen Hamrick; Printing history and editorial design in the Elizabethan version of Tottels Songes and Sonettes, Paul A. Marquis; Profit and pleasure? The real economy of Tottels Songes and Sonettes, Catherine Bates; Tottels Troy, Alex Davis; Chaucers presence in Songes and Sonettes, Amanda Holton; Songes and Sonettes, 1557, Peter C. Herman; Songes and Sonettes and Shakespeares poetry, Tom MacFaul; Cultivation and inhumation: some thoughts on the cultural impact of Tottels Songes and Sonettes, Seth Lerer; Their Gods in verses: the popular reception of Songes and Sonettes, 1557-1674, Stephen Hamrick; Bibliography; Index.Stephen Hamrick is Associate Professor of English lc